Parents in Texas are staying in the driver's seat—at least when it comes to kids and app downloads. The US Supreme Court on Monday allowed the state to enforce a law that tightens age checks and requires parental consent before minors can buy or download apps, while a legal fight over the measure continues, Politico reports. The justices issued a brief, one-line order declining an emergency request to pause the Texas App Store Accountability Act.
The law, revived by an appeals court last month after a federal judge had put it on hold, is being challenged by youth advocacy group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Apple, Google, and Meta. They argue it curbs young people's access to digital tools and violates the First Amendment. "Protecting First Amendment rights—and parents' rights to supervise their children as they see fit, not as the government tells them they should is always in the public interest," wrote attorneys for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, per the AP.
Lawyers from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office argued that a child "with access to an app store and a mobile device ... can potentially download any number of software applications, potentially agreeing to invasions of the child's privacy and sale of the child's data and be exposed to any conceivable content without parental consent or even parental knowledge." Backing Texas: a bipartisan coalition of 27 state attorneys general that filed a supporting brief. The Supreme Court last year allowed a separate Texas age-check law targeting porn sites to stand.
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